


el lobo

by glassy_light



Category: No Country for Old Men (2007)
Genre: Gen, backstory i guess???, idk dudes i wrote this in october
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:29:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23381716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glassy_light/pseuds/glassy_light
Summary: Even wolves die in the desert.
Kudos: 8





	el lobo

Once or twice he tried to run away from home—to live in the dust and dry heat in peaceful, drowsy solitude—but fear of what would happen to his mother and sister drew him back. He would crawl out of his desert fort of scrub brush and dry buffalograss, pat the dirt from his clothes, and then walk barefoot across the burning concrete town to his home, a kind of self-inflicted punishment for allowing himself to be motivated by fear. It felt dirty and shameful; kept him solemn; hardened his heart.

His home was a solid brick building, crumbling into red dust in places, with tile hallways and a cool, dark basement mostly left unlocked. When things got bad, when glasses were thrown against walls and his mother was dragged screaming by her hair, he would take his sister’s pudgy baby hand and they would sit in the black with the boxes of molding newspapers and cracked old furniture left by tenants. The maintenance man, a whip-thin high school dropout who spent most of his time smoking like a chimney out by the dumpsters, would look at them with half-shut, knowing eyes and then act like the didn’t exist. Which was a blessing. Anton thought that if more people acted like the maintenance man, his life would be a whole lot easier.

The manager of the complex was unfortunately very aware of his existence. The fat, irritable man with bald spots dappling his hairline and rheumy fish eyes would chase him from his perch on the rusted fire escape, down hallways and out of the lobby. Twice he was dragged by the collar through the sickly luminescence of the hallway, dusty houseplants casting long shadows from their stations on the landings, looking like witnesses to an execution. If it was morning, there was hope of his mother opening the door on her way to the laundromat, but both times he was met by the cold face of his father, home from the night shift at the paper mill, and the buckle of the belt once the door was closed. He learned to hide well quick

During the school year, he would show up with bruised arms or blackened eyes, but it was always excused by scraps with classmates at recess or in the hallway. He would be there every day, a morose fixture of the classroom. He walked with his sister to and from the bus stop; waited for her outside her 1st-grade classroom. For someone who ended up in the principal's office often, he scored well on tests up until the end of freshman year, when the truancy officer started showing up with a clipboard, inquiring in a nasal voice.

In the summer, he would wander the sidewalks, picking up coins from the gutter and trading the silvery discs for ice cream or pop, or would slip paperbacks from the library under his shirt and read them on the fire escape. He would sneak into the laundromat and sit on machines as they spun strangers clothes, as enameled and white as the baby teeth tucked with lockets of hair into the bottom of his mother’s jewelry box, nursing a lollipop or chewing wad of bazooka dispensed generously from the pockets of his mother's elderly boss.

His sister would trail behind him, or would walk to their Abuela’s house to play house or barbies with the scrappy gaggle of neighborhood girls. Sometimes he would be roped  into their games, would sit and watch as they traced suns and birds in hot tropical colors onto the sidewalk in chalk. Or he would be the patriarch of a game of house, forced to marry Jenny from six doors down, escaping to the bodega a few blocks away on a make-believe journey to work.

His first job was at a gas station by the downtown H-E-B. He worked the quiet shift after school; too early for people stopping by after work, too late for the lunch rush. His supervisor was a friend of his uncle (usually absent), and his only coworker was a mousey classmate who spent her time biting her nails and alphabetically arranging the stockroom. who spent his day sitting on the bench by the pumps watching the cars go by. He liked the quiet, and the stacks of glossy magazines and rows of neat boxes and bottles. He liked counting out change, looking at the engraved dates, dreaming of times and places outside of the flat expanse of southern Texas. His paychecks were always handed over to his mother, who kissed his forehead and then divided it between food and rent and school clothes until it disappeared.

When he was 15, his father cracked his skull on the jagged line of cement stairs in a drunken stupor, gore leaking out like yolk. The man, at 56, was still spitting fury, but life had left him weak and frayed at the edges. It only took a sharp, well-timed shove against his chest and the man was pinwheeling downwards into the grave. Anton believed that maybe they were saved. It was chance, and chance only, that the injury was enough to kill, that he connected with enough force to fracture, that the neighbors, usually apathetic, testified he was a drunk. For the first time, the stained glass saints and prophets of Sundays came to mean something other than an obligation: the world was left to its chance. He had been given a chance.

By the time he graduated, he felt he was living time borrowed from fate. He had moved with his mother and sister to a hotel on the dusty border of town, the desert railing up against them. The rent had grown too much; his grandmother was dead and her house mortgaged to pay old debts. 

He didn’t mind it; even liked the small changes between the rooms, the way they were essentially the same but minutely different. This one had orange, not blue, tile in the bathroom; that one had different lampshades; another smelled of the cologne of a businessman who just departed. His mother still worked at the laundromat, but now at the town’s diner too, balancing shifts like dirty dishes. His sister did housekeeping, folding sheets and washing towels for minimum wage.

When he got his first car (a scrappy 65’ chevy suburban with transmission issues) he started picking up packages for his boss (the tall man from the butcher shop; the old man at the gas station had long since been fired and replaced). It made suspiciously good money, and after a few months of this he was brought into the cramped back office, where he was offered a position picking up parcels directly from mules and dividing and redistributing to various dealers across the western border states. He stood in the papery yellow light that leaked through the drawn blinds and shook the man’s leathery hand.

It paid better. Suddenly, he was on the road six days a week, sleeping in his car on the side of the highway or in cheap motor inns with wheezing a/c’s and watermarked ceilings. His money went to his family. His mother stopped working two jobs. They moved into a small white house where his mother didn’t have to sleep on the couch and his sister had a place to study. 

His mother worked it out one night over a silent dinner and sobbed into her folded hands. His sister knew something was off, but was too young to understand exactly what. When he heard his mother praying for him at night, he tried to remember that his sister might be able to enroll at a private school; that they were well fed and comfortable.

“Mi hijo,” his mother would greet him at the door. 

“El lobo!” his boss would say, clapping him on the shoulder. 

Every meeting was another test of fate; a flip of the coin. When he opened his car door and stepped onto the blacktop, meeting in pitch-dark parking lots and vacant stretches of highway, he could feel the dice rolling; the card being drawn; the crack of bone in an empty stairwell. The barrel of his gun, tucked against his skin, was cold and sobering.

The first time something went wrong was in the stagnant heat of Nevada August. He had pulled onto a long dirt drive; was waiting outside a metal fence to nowhere. He had a suitcase of money leaning against his leg. When the two runners opened their trunk to show him the wrapped bricks, they pulled a rifle, and suddenly the coin was balanced on its side, waiting to fall.

He shot the one with the rifle as the man tried to spray him with birdshot. He fell back and the spray ripped into the meat of Anton’s shoulder. He struggled to stay on his feet. The man’s partner dove around the side of the car; was hunched against the now flat tire. He didn’t have anything on him. 

“Hacerlo si es necesario.” The man had tired eyes set deep in a weathered face. Anton had to, so he did. After the trigger was pulled he loaded his car, and took from the glovebox a phone directory. He found the address of a veterinary clinic. 

In the parking lot, he pulled his shirt away from his shoulder. Blood sluiced down his chest, and he pulled on his jacket to cover it and left the car. He dabbed sweat from his face with the dark denim sleeve and pushed open the glass door. The office was painfully bright, the clerk behind the desk busy writing something on a notepad, phone lodged between his ear and shoulder. Anton slipped down a hallway and found an exam room, dark and empty.

A nurse walked by the doorway. He didn’t turn away until. Then he filled the white skin of a lab coat with bottles of aniseptic wash and gauze and forceps and tweezers, pulling them from shelves and cabinets until it was bulging. He loaded it in his arms, smiled harshly when the clerk looked up. Something was called out after him, but it didn’t matter.

He treated the wound in the silence of a motel bathroom. When he returned to the cramped yellowed office, his boss looked at his stained shirt and the money and the bricks. Slipped him a business card for some underground doctor; told him he would be getting a call.

Soon he was on the payroll of another company entirely, and suddenly it wasn’t just pick up and distribution. He was living on the road again, working his way around desert towns and cities, leaving a bloody trail of lost bets behind him. His sister’s student loans for law school were paid. His mother retired, and when she died there was a funeral service and a marble headstone, all covered by the price of dead men. 

He was a passing shadow, slipping through the fingers of fate. Sometimes he felt favored by chance, other times abandoned by it: alive on accident. If he was in one place, it was for short periods of time. He wasn’t sentimental; couldn’t be if he wanted to keep escaping. Often he would feel it drawing closer, something on the wind, and would know it was time to move.

When exhausted and bruised, he would think about buying a house; of living out in the desert, alone with the animal heat of Texas soil. Or Nevada. Maybe even Mexico. The desert always was the same. But the thought would fade, a distant vision wavering in the sun. Sometimes he thought, while driving the long stretches between Del Rio and El Paso and Tucson, about what he would do next. Everything felt temporary, like he was moving towards some greater fate that kept moving away from him; destined to happen but uncertain all the same. He knew in his heart that chance would eventually drag him to the grave that had so long been awaiting his arrival.

This was all long gone. He was driving a stolen car in silence, paying for his injuries with sweat that burned in his eyes. He looked at his one hand on the wheel. Tried not to look at the slick bone and tendon of his other arm. His split lip made his mouth ring metallic, like he had swallowed a quarter. 

He turned off the road suddenly; dove straight into the desert. It was over. Finally. The coin fell heads and he’d bet tails.

When he dragged himself from the car, it was in the flat expanse of Texas nowhere. He staggered to sit under a crooked mesquite, waiting for fate to meet him.

Time moved like rubber. He opened his eyes to the moon, then was snapped into burning noon. His arm was throbbing with its own heavy pulse. A hawk circled and faded. Anton thought he could feel the change in the long shadows. Even wolves die in the desert.

  
  
  
  



End file.
